LIMBOLAND: PUBLIC HOUSING IN THE POST-CRASH ENGLISH NORTH

The goals of this paper are to document the everyday, multi-faceted harms experienced by working class, public housing tenants in the inner-city enclosures of the UK. Drawing on one case study UK city in the semi-peripheral, deindustrialized English North (Salford), the paper draws together the multiple ways in which public housing has become a site of harm and injustice. By injustice, the paper refers to how the relations of trust, certainty and attachment which secure tenancies once helped provide have become precaritized and undermined – not just dissolved. By ‘multiplicity’, the paper reflects on the various dimensions of harm which precaritize in situ public tenants – not just the threat of outright eviction. The paper seeks to enrich understandings of public housing experience and struggle in the contemporary era when tenancies are under serious threat, shortages are acute and support for tenants is being retrenched in the name of ‘austerity’. How are tenants and activists interpreting these attacks? What does this tell us about the security of low income communities in the neoliberal city? Is the attack on public housing fatally attacking class homes; eradicating spaces of care and value which sit outside market logics?